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Five whys: The startup immune system, Part 1 - Venture Hacks - The Diigo Meta page

venturehacks.com/...five-whys - Cached - Annotated View

Joel Liu's personal annotations on this page

joel
Joel bookmarked on 2008-11-15 entrepreneur habit culture
  • Summary: Whenever you find a defect, ask why five times to discover the root cause of the problem. Then make corrections at every level of the analysis. By applying five whys whenever you find a defect, you will (1) uncover the human problems beneath technical problems and (2) build an immune system for your startup.
  • When something goes wrong, we tend to see it as a crisis and seek to blame. A better way is to see it as a learning opportunity. Not in the existential sense of general self-improvement. Instead, we can use the technique of asking why five times to get to the root cause of the problem and make corrections.
    • Why was the website down? The CPU utilization on all our front-end servers went to 100%.
    • Why did the CPU usage spike? A new bit of code contained an infinite loop!
    • Why did that code get written? So-and-so made a mistake.
    • Why did his mistake get checked in? He didn’t write a unit test for the feature.
    • Why didn’t he write a unit test? He’s a new employee, and he was not properly trained in Test Driven Development (TDD).
    • Bring the site back up.
    • Remove the bad code.
    • Help so-and-so understand why his code doesn’t work as written.
    • Train so-and-so in the principles of TDD.
    • Change the new engineer orientation to include TDD.
  • Making corrections builds your startup immune system.
  • 5 whys uncovers the human problems beneath technology problems.
  • Make your corrections proportional to the cost of the defect.

This link has been bookmarked by 5 people . It was first bookmarked on 14 Nov 2008, by Damon Snyder.

  • 02 Dec 08
    danancona
    Dan Ancona

    fivewhys startup

  • 23 Nov 08
    jonbab1
    jonathan Babcock

    Whenever you find a defect, ask why five times to discover the root cause of the problem. Then make corrections at every level of the analysis. By applying five whys whenever you find a defect, you will (1) uncover the human problems beneath technical problems and (2) build an immune system for your startup.

    QA elicitation

  • 15 Nov 08
    joel
    Joel Liu

    entrepreneur habit culture

    • Summary: Whenever you find a defect, ask why five times to discover the root cause of the problem. Then make corrections at every level of the analysis. By applying five whys whenever you find a defect, you will (1) uncover the human problems beneath technical problems and (2) build an immune system for your startup.
    • When something goes wrong, we tend to see it as a crisis and seek to blame. A better way is to see it as a learning opportunity. Not in the existential sense of general self-improvement. Instead, we can use the technique of asking why five times to get to the root cause of the problem and make corrections.
    • 5 more annotations...
  • 14 Nov 08
    drsnyder
    Damon Snyder

    startup process 5whys entrepreneur

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